Breaking the Cycle

In Alison Bechdel’s life, which she chronicles in Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, there exist many questions that do not have straightforward answers.  As a child, and through her later adolescence, Bechdel dealt with emotional and medical challenges that contribute to the recurring theme of circles and cycles, ones common in literature, throughout her autobiography.

While some of the cyclically thematic symbols are predominant and archetypal, such as the serpent that may have been a factor in her father’s death, others, like Bechdel’s battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder, are less so.  However, this illness is an integral part of her story and one of the many revolving tribulations that she faced. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by a cyclic pattern of thinking that both causes and temporarily relieves the anxiety of an afflicted individual.  The repeated thoughts, and the extensive compulsions done to relieve the anxiety that they cause, can have a torturous effect, leading to feelings of having no control and being trapped or frozen within a circumstance. 

In Chapter 5, The Canary Colored Caravan, Bechdel describes the onset of her symptoms, at age 10.  At times, her compulsions included counting; certain events had to occur an even number of times.  Later, she dealt with feelings of being surrounded by contaminated air, and she had certain rituals that had to take place at the end of each day.  All of these aspects of her illness fed into her patterns, what Bechdel describes as a “self-soothing, autistic loop” (139). 

However, as was the case throughout her life, Alison Bechdel persevered and broke the cycle.  By keeping a diary, and eventually allowing her mother to do the actual writing, the author beats her illness.  The self-imposed structure that Bechdel created is reminiscent of the cognitive behavioral therapy known to be highly effective in treating OCD; it forces a person to habituate to their anxiety, because the body cannot sustain such a high degree of apprehension for an extended period of time. 

And so, despite the connections between Bechdel and her father, especially as she grew older, one of the ways in which their lives were so disparate is born out of this theme—while Bechdel broke free of so many restrictions and changed the progression of events in her life, and came into a true and open identity, her father never did.  He remained within the patterns of deceit and hidden truths; even in his death, he remains stuck, as Bechdel illustrates, within a certain radius of where he was born and where he lived.  She notes that living in a bigger city, a different place might have “saved” him, but that in fact, her “father’s life was a solipsistic circle of self” (140).  He never escaped, but Alison Bechdel did, to tell her story and live her truth outside of the never-ending constraints of her early years.